In particular circumstances, old books come up. “Old” is a relative term, of course. There’s Homer and there’s Robert Penn Warren. In 1946, Warren published his novel All the King’s Men. It is about Huey Long and the workings of populism. (Warren dubs his Long character “Willie Stark.”) Five or six years ago, a political-science professor, a conservative, told me, “I’ve begun assigning that book to my students. It helps them understand the times we are living in. Frankly, it’s all there. That book is uncanny.”

After Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine, I kept running into people who were reading Life and Fate. This is the novel by Vasily Grossman, which he wrote in the late 1950s. It’s about Russia, Ukraine, war, terror, identity — lots of things. Grossman’s government, in Moscow, would not permit the book’s publication. The author died in 1964. His book was smuggled out and published in the West in 1980.

For several months in 2022 and 2023, Life and Fate sat on my bedside table. I picked it up now and then, reading a page or two. But I would put it down, unwilling to bear it. The news out of Ukraine, day after day, was unbearable enough.

Today, North Korean troops are making war alongside Russians in Ukraine. Russian forces are killing Ukrainians with Iranian drones. China is collaborating with Russia in the making of weapons. The worst dictatorships in the world are in alliance: those in Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela . . . The free and democratic world is in the crosshairs. Ukraine and Israel are front lines, obviously. Is Taiwan next? Anyone caring to glance up will see that the skies are dark.

In recent years, I have heard mention of The World of Yesterday — repeated mention. I am talking about the memoirs of Stefan Zweig, published in 1942. They constitute an autobiography, of course, but also an account of Europe from the late 19th century until 1939 — September of that year.

Zweig may not be a household name today, but he was one of the most famous writers in the world. By some accounts, he was the most widely translated living writer. What did he write? Practically everything. Poems, plays, and novels. Biographies, histories, and essays. Zweig was both brilliant and humane. Virtually coined for him was the term “humane letters.”

He had European civilization within him. He knew his literary and artistic forebears, and he knew his literary and artistic contemporaries, personally. Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Mann. Joyce, Shaw, and Wells. Pirandello, Valéry, and Gorky. Those are just a few writers. Among composers, we could list Strauss, Busoni, Bartók, and Ravel.

Zweig was born in 1881. His town, his base, was Vienna: open, polyglot, liberal Vienna. He grew up in a “golden age of security,” as he writes in The World of Yesterday. Even the Jews, such as Zweig and his family, felt secure. They were nearly as Austrian as the Hapsburgs. All of this, though, proved illusory. “Our world of security,” writes Zweig, “was a castle in the air.”

He and his generation would know horror upon horror: economic collapse, epidemics, exile (if death by violence could be escaped). They saw the growth of hideous isms: Bolshevism in Russia, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, and brutal nationalisms all over.

The summer of 1914 was exceptionally beautiful in Europe. Zweig vacationed in Belgium. “Visitors enjoying their holiday lay on the beach in brightly colored tents or bathed in the sea,” he writes. “All imaginable nations were gathered companionably together there.” Moreover, “a great deal of German was spoken, because, as usual, holidaymakers from the nearby Rhineland liked to come to the Belgian beaches.” Would Germany really invade this peaceful little neutral country? Would German soldiers brutalize these people? Yes.

In Vienna, there was much patriotism, or “patriotism” — a war fever. The more boobish poets kept rhyming Krieg and Sieg (“war” and “victory”) and Not and Tod (“need” and “death”). “The more wildly you raved, the more of a hearing you got,” writes Zweig.

As the years ground on, however, the reality of the war set in. A white-haired priest, who had administered many last rites, said to Zweig, “I am 67 years old. I have seen a great deal. But I never thought humanity capable of such crimes.”

After the war, Zweig settled in Salzburg — little, provincial Salzburg, a quiet place in which to work. He is vivid on the aftermath of the war (as on everything else). I will quote a single line: “For the first time, I saw, in the yellow, dangerous eyes of the starving, what famine really looks like.”

Eventually, life stabilized. But Zweig had glimpses of the world soon to come. He saw Blackshirts in St. Mark’s Square, maneuvering smartly and singing the “Giovinezza.” He saw Brownshirts in a border town with Austria, maneuvering even more smartly, and alarmingly, though not singing. Proud boys all.

Hitler got power in 1933. In due course, Zweig was a personal annoyance to him. Strauss had composed a new opera: Die schweigsame Frau (“The Silent Woman,” based on Ben Jonson). Hitler adored Strauss. But the opera’s librettist was a Jew, namely Zweig. What to do? Hitler dithered. He allowed the opera’s premiere, which took place in Dresden. But he canceled the show after three performances.

In Salzburg, Zweig lived on the Kapuzinerberg. With the naked eye, he could see Hitler’s place, across the border in Berchtesgaden. On these two peaks, within sight of each other, stood two opposites: an embodiment of European civilization and its eager destroyer.

Month after month, news from Germany reached the broader world. It was hard to believe the news. It was more convenient not to believe it. Could Hitler and his movement, his government, really be so bad? As Zweig recounts, Hitler kept testing to see what he could get away with. And the answer was: anything.

This may remind you of Putin and other dictators now practicing.

One day, Zweig noticed something telltale. He noticed it on the street, in Salzburg, well before the Anschluss. An old friend of his avoided greeting him. The next day, to make up for it, the friend called on Zweig at home. It was becoming dangerous to be friendly in public with Jews — even world-famous ones. Zweig went into exile, to England.

He found that the English were in a state of denial, which was natural, given the world war that they and everyone else had only recently been through. “I kept hearing that all Hitler meant to do was bring the ethnic Germans from outlying areas into the German fold,” writes Zweig. What’s more, “the English were coming to think that his claims to a Greater Germany might be justified.”

This is very familiar, in our own time, where Putin and Ukraine are concerned.

Would Hitler really invade Austria? Zweig writes that his friends back home were in a state of self-deception. Their attitude was: France and Britain would not allow it to happen, and neither would Mussolini’s Italy. These Austrians “believed in the League of Nations and the peace treaties just as the sick believe in medicine with a pretty label.”

With the Anschluss came atrocities, as Hitler’s boys had their way with the helpless. “All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad daylight.” Zweig records a few examples. These passages are hard to read. Around the world, people were shocked by the atrocities. Such things were not supposed to happen in the 20th century, with airplanes whizzing about, and dread diseases at last being overcome. When the shock wore off, numbness set in. Zweig repeatedly uses the word “inured.” The inurement was worse than the shock.

We are familiar with this, too. Newspapers can barely bestir themselves to report on the latest inhumanity in Ukraine — the latest bombing of a school, say. And people are often peeved to hear about it. Why don’t the Ukrainians just give in and end the war? Why won’t they make peace? (Ukrainians, among others, know that “peace” under Russian occupation can be even worse than war.)

Much later than Zweig — indeed, after the Anschluss — Sigmund Freud left Austria for London. Zweig went to see the venerable doctor, then 81. As a “humane man,” writes Zweig, Freud was “deeply distressed” by the outbreak of savagery, but, as a “thinker,” he was “not at all surprised.” “He had always been considered a pessimist, he said, because he denied the supremacy of culture over our instinctive drives.”

Zweig ends his book on September 3, 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, which two days before had invaded Poland. Zweig and his wife, Lotte, left England for the United States in 1940. Then they went to Brazil, their final place of exile.

In February 1942, Zweig put his manuscript, his memoirs, in the mail. The next day, he and Lotte committed a double suicide.

The book could not be published in Austro-Germany, of course — Zweig, like all other Jews, celebrated or not, was banned. It was published in Stockholm.

At one point in his book, Zweig uses the word “relapse”: “the unimaginable relapse of mankind into what was believed to be long-forgotten barbarism.” In 2018, Robert Kagan published a book called “The Jungle Grows Back.” I have never known a title to capture so perfectly a book’s thesis. When I mentioned this to the author, he said something like, “It’s true. You almost didn’t need to write a book to go with the title.” His subtitle is “America and Our Imperiled World.” He writes, “The liberal world order is like a garden, ever under siege from the forces of history, the jungle whose vines and weeds constantly threaten to overwhelm it.”

After World War II, Manchuria and Spain were seen as preludes to it. Are we, could we be, witnessing preludes today? This is a “night thought,” to borrow a phrase from David Pryce-Jones.

Last year, I had a conversation with Eliot A. Cohen, the political scientist who specializes in strategy. He mentioned a book by the late historian Zara Steiner about the 1930s: The Triumph of the Dark. Future historians may write of the current period as another “triumph of the dark,” said Cohen — but “it doesn’t have to be that way.”

How so? “It’s on us,” Cohen explained. Human beings have choices. Individuals make a difference. Their character, our character, matters. Human action, or inaction, matters.

There’s another book by a Viennese Jew, born two months before Zweig: Human Action (Mises). Maybe we can say that tyranny and depravity are part of human nature, but so is righteous opposition to them. Which side will prevail? And for how long.